Satya Nadella-led Microsoft has rebranded its flagship product Office 365 to Microsoft 365 so it can reflect the entire family of apps and services that are part of the productivity suite and have been added in the last few years.
Amidst the lockdown and cancellation of several tech events due to Covid-19, the announcement was made by Microsoft via an official blog post on 30 March. The actual rebranding will take place on 21 April, while new features will be rolled out to over 38 million Office 365 subscribers over the next few months.
Microsoft has assured that existing users can enjoy Office 365 without any changes in features and subscription price until then. The core Office products including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are not going anywhere and will remain as important as they are now. Microsoft is hoping that the change in name will allow them to get users to try out their other cloud-based productivity tools such as Teams, Stream, Forms, and Planner.
With work from home becoming a new norm in the wake of the ongoing epidemic, collaboration tools are getting a lot of traction. With tools like Teams and Steam in the portfolio, the Office 365 suite has two unlikely stars waiting to steal the limelight from the core Office products.